Intellectual Capital/Stewart 145-153

149 It is a principle of managing intellectual capital that when information is power, power flows downstream toward the customer.

153 A value chain, recall, shows how a product or service moves from first seller to end users, from raw material to goods on the shelf. Value is--or ought to be--added to each stage. The idea is to add as much value as possible at as little cost as possible, and to capture that value in your markup.

An alert manager can look for information everywhere in the value chain, and put it wherever it has the biggest return. Therefore managers have to ask three question of the value chain: What information drives the business? Who has it? To whom is it worth most?